SMX Live: Real Answers For Technical SEO Problems

Below is live coverage of the Real Answers For Technical SEO Problems panel from the SMX West conference. This coverage is provided by Avi Wilensky of Promedia Corp.

Disclaimer: The coverage is brought to you in real time, using a custom live blogging tool. Feel free to ask questions or leave comments for inclusion into the live coverage. During the live event, live notes will auto-scroll with newest entries at top. After the session is complete the archive version will have the oldest entries at the top. We ask you to please excuse any typos, as these are live notes.

10:59:02 AMAvi Wilensky:Great to have 2 URLs in Google for your site, but don't want another language showing up as the double listing.

10:59:59 AMAvi Wilensky:This new tag is a link element in the HTTP head that says where the equivalent translated content exists - need to specify all alternates on each page. Can be on same or different domain.

11:18:30 AMAvi Wilensky:How to avoid scrapers? Use absolutes vs relative URLs. Use the base-href command and if scrape and don't take it out, links belong to you!

11:19:04 AMAvi Wilensky:There are services out there to protect your site from bots. Scraped content most likely wont outrank the official site so may be indication that theres other stuff to look at.

11:19:54 AMAvi Wilensky:Bing - not as good at crawling JS or Flash, aslo does not support cross domain rel canonical

11:20:31 AMAvi Wilensky:Bing relying more on the XML sitemap

11:21:41 AMAvi Wilensky:Best practices is to use canonical bc never know when a tracking code will be added, for example. Bing says they dont want a canonical tag to match the url, doesnt make sense to vanessa.

11:22:44 AMAvi Wilensky:VF sees bing overcrawling or not enough.

11:25:09 AMAvi Wilensky:Whats the quickest way to remove pages from the index? Add noindex is best bet. Robots won't do it.

11:28:25 AMAvi Wilensky:Google determines the language, no way to tell Google what language - do it on their own.

11:30:04 AMAvi Wilensky:Jonathan Hochman is up. 3 ways to get Jiggy with pagination.

11:30:59 AMAvi Wilensky:Classic method - never canonical to first page and nonindex others. View all technique - Elegant, hard to get implemented New Skool method - rel next / prev, assorted other signals

11:31:35 AMAvi Wilensky:With ecommerce hard to get buy in with "view all" technique. Needs to be fast and have all content.

11:31:56 AMAvi Wilensky:Classic method - not recommended anymore. Rel next prev working great in his test.

11:33:41 AMAvi Wilensky:Zappos.com/clothing converts less but rank better than a product listing page.

11:34:31 AMAvi Wilensky:Google can take signals that can influence scoring, consolidation, and make display decisions at search time. With rel next prev is that they can chose to display 2,3,4 at search time.

11:36:01 AMAvi Wilensky:Rel next prev consolidates all scores in series of pages, noindex keeps pages out of index bc typically P1 is where the focus is.

11:36:45 AMAvi Wilensky:Bing wont be able to follow this, but can use other signals to accomplish the same thing!

11:37:48 AMAvi Wilensky:What if you use rel, next prev without noindex? Most likely P1 will come up. Rel noidex is taking it far according to Maile.

11:38:31 AMAvi Wilensky:That was awesome, thanks Adam Audette.

11:43:27 AMAvi Wilensky:Jonathan Hochman: Speed. Fixing speed issues can get into infrastructure and hard to get buy in to make changes

11:44:32 AMAvi Wilensky:Recommends CloudFlare.com - a new free CDN - similar to Akamai. Founded by the project honeypot folks.

11:45:16 AMAvi Wilensky:Built security into the CDN. Detects if the site is a bot or scraper or hacker, block that stuff. A great value to websites. Expected that it would slow down websites, but found it speeds up by about 40%.

11:45:54 AMAvi Wilensky:Great protection so that don't get knocked off the net. Great new idea that he wanted to share.

11:48:32 AMAvi Wilensky:AJAX/HTML - Maile was at conference in London, with HTML 5 can use do AJAX like things but will render browsers url on the client site to change states. If JS is disabled, still crawl-able. Hash-bang.

11:48:50 AMAvi Wilensky:Recommend push state.

11:50:13 AMAvi Wilensky:Subdomain vs Subfolder. Don't change URLs around if not necessary. Vanessa says doesn't make a difference, often better to use a subdomain if totally different. Need a valid a reason to migrate URLs and think about users and what makes sense. Subdomains dont have ranking ability right away that the primary would. Think about UX over SEO.

11:51:11 AMAvi Wilensky:Videos: Say you have a UGC site - how does Google rank the content there if users add to multiple sites.

11:52:42 AMAvi Wilensky:How important is it to remove 404 errors in GWT? Its just a heads up, no need to remove. IF there are links, redirect them. From an SE perspective # of 404's doesn't signal less trust.